Wednesday, 18 May, 2011

Bookmarks for April 28th through May 18th

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious. There is also even more stuff on my shared Google Reader page.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.

#Bookmarks for April 28th through May 18th

From New Public Management to Open Governance (the back story)

I’m delighted to publish this – a guest post from Emer Coleman, Director of Digital Projects at the GLA, sharing her dissertation with us.

Anyone who has been following me on Twitter for the past year will know my struggles with “the dreaded dissertation” so it might be worth putting its origins in context.

In a previous life as Director of Strategy for Barnet Council I disagreed with a very deeply held belief in Local Government that the holy grail of resident satisfaction was how much you communicated with your residents. There was a correlation in Best Value surveys carried out every three years between “how informed” residents were and their satisfaction levels. But of course correlation does not imply causality. The simple edict went as follows Council Magazine + A to Z of Council Services + Managing Local News = Satisfied Residents.

Our corporate management team therefore wanted to do a huge communications campaign in advance of one of these surveys to ensure that residents knew exactly what their council did for them. The logic being that when they filled out their surveys on council performance they would recognize the council’s work. If only.

My Chief Executive at the time in response to my doubts said – “well if you want to change their minds you better put up a well argued case”. My dissertation is my attempt to do that.

In a nutshell it draws on the work of the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas who draws the distinction between the System and the Lifeworld. In the system where government lives we believe in these simplistic correlations but in the messy and complex Lifeworld we know that human beings don’t act in rational or predictable ways.

My belief is that open data, open government and the open conversations that take place in public in the social web offer great opportunities to move from the rational ordered public sector way of doing things to a more humanized, communicative form of governance. I tried to example that in the case study on the London Datastore and by including contributions by so many people in the open data movement that have helped me in developing my public policy work around open data.

My work and practice has been incredibly energized by the interactions that happen on the web and through my engagement with developers and innovators committed to the public realm. Mark Drapeau (@cheeky_geeky) calls them The Goverati (though my tutor didn’t like the name much) but I do. So a big thank you to all of you (you know who you are).

Download From New Public Management to Open Governance (PDF 2.3mb)

#From New Public Management to Open Governance (the back story)

Tuesday, 17 May, 2011

Spreading the GovCamp love

A quick cross post of something Steph put up on the MoreOpen blog, highlighting the great events funded in part by UKGC11.

At the beginning of March, we announced a small grant scheme using sponsorship from the UKGovcamp in January 2011 to help seed-fund a batch of further such events around the country. We had some great applications, and here’s the list of who we’ve funded so far:

We Are What We Tweet
8 April 2011

As part of the Social Media as Practise course as MA students of Social Media at Birmingham City University, the class staged a one day event looking examining the context of social media use and how it can bring governments and citizens together.

Recipient: Chioma Agwuegbo
Received: £300

ShropCamp
19 April 2011

Focused on communities and services. How can we use social media and open data to help service providers to work more effectively at a local level?

Recipient: Ben Proctor
Received: £600

MailCamp
12 May 2011

MailCamp is a free, one-off show & tell event on 12 May for people interested in how the public sector uses email marketing, newsletter and alerts to engage its audiences.

Recipient: Steph Gray
Received: £600

YouthWorkOnline unconference
21 May 2011

This one-day free open space event brings together practitioners from youth work, participation and voluntary youth projects with digital media developers and experts to share ideas and practice, to explore what the digital world means for young people’s lives, and for services seeking to support young people as they navigate growing up in a connected world.

Register at: http://cgen11.eventbrite.com/

Recipient: Tim Davies
Received: £600

Localgovcamp
18 June 2011

LocalGovCamp is coming back to its spiritual home, Birmingham, this June – and it’s going to be bigger and better than ever. 200 of the most innovative and creative people in the local government sector will be coming together on a Saturday to talk about making things better – sometimes with technology, sometimes not.

Register at: http://localgovcamp2011.eventbrite.com/

Recipient: Dave Briggs
Received: £1,000

LearnPod
13 July 2011

LearnPod aims to debate the use of technology and innovation in learning, predominantly in the post-16 education context.

Register at: http://learnpod11.eventbrite.com

Recipient: Kevin Campbell-Wright
Received: £500

QuangoCamp

July/August 2011 TBC

A one day pratical & sharing event for those who don’t quite fit in with central gov, are a long way from local gov and also don’t quite click with the events in higher education, museums or the charity sector. Reclaiming the word ‘quango’ for a positive, rather than a focus for scorn.

Recipient: Matt Jukes
Received: £400

ScotGovCamp
September 2011, TBC

ScotGovCamp is a self organised unconference for people who work in and around government in Scotland.

Recipient: Lesley Thomson
Received: £500

North London LocalGovCamp
TBC

A North London localgovcamp event, inviting people who are involved with related projects, focusing on North London boroughs – Camden, Islington, Haringey, Barnet, etc.

Recipient: Anke Holst
Received: £300

RuralCamp
TBC

Recipient: Dave Briggs
Received: £200

…

Ten spin-off projects ain’t bad going, touching maybe another 1000 people and keeping the govcamp buzz and optimism going through the year. Good luck – and thanks in advance – to the organisers above, and another big thank you to the original sponsors of UKGovcamp whose patronage helped all of these get off the ground via MoreOpen. An organiser of one of the events reported:

You were the first people to offer us sponsorship and that managed to convince other people to take us seriously. Without your help we probably wouldn’t have been able to deliver the event at all.

There’s a few quid left (really, not very much) so if you’re inspired to run your own event and would like a bit of help getting it off the ground, you know where to go.

 

#Spreading the GovCamp love

Monday, 16 May, 2011

More notes on mobile apps and government

I still haven’t really got my head around mobile apps and their use for government services. However, James Coltham wrote up some excellent notes from a meeting up in Scotland on the subject recently:

There is definitely a groundswell of interest, though, as well as a growing demand from the public, making for interesting times for anyone involved in making sure their services are ready to go mobile.

I wrote a few bits down last August, and if I’m honest my position hasn’t much changed from:

  1. Platform neutral mobile friendly websites are probably a better bet in an age of austerity
  2. App development is probably a job for the private sector, but I’m not convinced there’s an actual market (ie would people pay for an app to access government services?)
  3. Any app that would work for more than one organisation will need open data in a common format which doesn’t yet exist, though it might do soon (LinkedGov, KnowledgeHub, etc)

Also, what are the sorts of things people will want to do with councils or other public services on their phones? I suppose there are two elements to this:

  • Those things you might want which are suited more to a mobile device than anything else: ie, I need this information now, and here. Bus timetables are a good example, perhaps, or something else that can use location data.
  • Everything else, but delivered to a phone because that either where the owner prefers to access information and services, or because it’s their only way of accessing information and services

I think the second point is probably key to winning the argument for whether government organisations should seriously explore delivery via mobile devices. If we come to a point where a lot of people don’t bother with PCs because their phones do want they need them to, then that’s where the focus of electronic delivery probably should be pointed.

In other words, what does e-government look like in a post-PC era?

#More notes on mobile apps and government

Thursday, 12 May, 2011

Workblogging

Euan Semple wrote a short post the other day that really caught my eye. Here it is in full (hopefully he doesn’t mind!):

A business where everyone blogs. Everyone thinks about what they are doing and writes about what they are doing. From the top to the bottom, the edges to the middle. Everyone awake and bouncing off each other intellectually as they get more and more effective at whatever they do.

Now, Euan is a great thinker, writer, speaker and doer in the world of deploying social technology in organisations to make them work better. He was one of my first inspirations when I first started getting into this stuff seven years ago or so. He’s still writing great challenging stuff and sparking new ideas.

Because, of course, while blogging – one of the oldest forms of social media – may have been overtaken by social networking, status updating and location services in the fashion stakes, it remains one of the most powerful and useful methods of online interaction that exists.

After all, there’s no way I would be sat here, running my own business, doing what I love, were it not for the fact that I started blogging however many years ago it was.

Indeed, given that we seem to have a knowledge economy these days, how does an individual promote what it is that they know to the outside world? I’m not sure there’s a better vehicle than a blog, to be honest.

But it’s not just about personal gain and career enhancement. Having employees blog, as Euan states, has a great impact on organisations. Whether the blogs are out there on the web or just run internally, having people thinking and writing about their work means they get better at their jobs, and with everyone knowing what everyone else does, collaboration, knowledge sharing and silo-busting becomes a reality.

#Workblogging

New councillor? Get the training you need online

With the elections of May 5 2011 now complete Member Development Officers need to look at the most efficient and cost effective way to train these newly elected councillors.

Modern Councillor is the online learning and support destination for councillors, people considering standing for election, or indeed anyone with a passion for local democracy provided by my pals at Learning Pool.

The service has been designed with both new and more experienced elected members in mind. A subscription to Modern Councillor provides elected members with full access to a growing catalogue of e-learning modules, at a fraction of the cost of classroom based training as well as access to our online community.

What modules are included?

All 17 of the current e-learning modules have been created alongside subject matter experts and cover areas such as Induction, Media, Community and Legislation. Specific modules include Introduction to Local Government, Your Role as a Councillor and Getting Started with Social Media. You can view a full list of the current modules available in this PDF e-learning catalogue.

Who does the community involve?

Alongside a suite of e-learning modules, Modern Councillor will now include an online community bringing together councillors, prospective councillors, co-opted members, local government officers, activists, and residents so that they can connect, share and learn together. Join the community, for free, here.

Guest Access

If you’d like Guest Access to preview the training available through Modern Councillor or any other information, please email breda@learningpool.com.

MDO Support Webinar

Join us for our free webinar on training and supporting your elected members on Thursday, 19 May, 2011 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM BST. Register here.

#New councillor? Get the training you need online

Wednesday, 11 May, 2011

Tuesday, 10 May, 2011

Adverts on council websites

Adrian Short picks up on some adverts that appear on a council’s website. They’re for debt management companies that encourage people to apply for bankruptcy.

Probably not a good thing – I think we’d probably rather people needing advice about that sort of thing go to the Citizens Advice Bureau, for example.

Soem folk don’t think councils should run adverts on their sites. I’m pretty indifferent personally – if they can make it work and get some revenue to help develop the website, then that’s fair enough.

Councils running adverts on their websites do need to be very careful however about the contents of those adverts. If you’re using Google Adsense then it is possible to moderate the adverts to keep inappropriate content off your site. As a reputation management issue, this is a vital activity – but also of course to protect those using the site.

Maybe an alternative is to use a more local, friendly service than Google – such as Addiply. This would offer far more control.

Peter McClymont raises another interesting issue:

After all, councils get plenty of web traffic because there’s nowhere else to go for that content. If I want to pay my council tax, I have to visit the council website, meaning any adverts on that site get the benefit of my eyeballs and potential clicks as a result of that monopoly position.

I doubt if anyone has done any research in those areas where councils do run ads as to whether it has affected the revenues of the local newspaper website, for example. It would be interesting though, I think.

For more information on councils running adverts, Catherine Howe wrote an excellent summary post earlier this year.

#Adverts on council websites

Monday, 9 May, 2011

Fancy sponsoring LocalGovCamp?

LocalGovCamp isn’t far away – just over a month. So far 150 tickets have gone and we have another 50 which we are looking to distribute in a new way to get a few different faces along!

So we’ll have 200 of the most innovative and creative people in local government in one place, on a Saturday, ready to talk about how we can improve the way we do things. It’s going to be ace.

One thing we do need though is money. Bringing the event out of London made finding a free venue impossible, and so we face a bigger bill than usual from the get-go. On top of that we have some extra money to find for some unexpected expenses.

So, if you would like to help this event out and ensure it’s the success it ought to be, please get in touch with any offers of cash you might have spare.

  • £250 gets your logo on the website, the ability to bring a pop up stand and some marketing literature with you, and lots of vocal thanks throughout the day.
  • £500 gets you all the above plus a logo on the t-shirt.
  • Anything substantial over the £500 mark means I’ll also give you a piggy back around for the day (or something).

Thanks go to those who have already put their hands in their pockets: the MoreOpen fund, Huddle, LGIU and Podnosh. Also Digital Birmingham who have helped massively with organising things. Oh, and Kind of Digital of course 😉

#Fancy sponsoring LocalGovCamp?

Friday, 6 May, 2011

Here comes Noot – the public sector social business tool

I’ve written loads in the past about the importance of using social technology in the workplace, especially in the public sector.

It’s great for tearing down silos, sharing knowledge, making the most of talent, completing projects successfully and maybe making life a bit more interesting.

One bit of technology I have had my eye on for a while is a bit of open source loveliness called Open Atrium, which is based on the popular and powerful Drupal framework.

What really caught my attention was that it was announced recently that the White House were using it to collaborate with. This is a bit of software that means business.

So I was delighted when I started talking with my good pals Harry and Rupert at Neontribe – web developers and user experience legends from Norwich (and who are organising RewiredState Norfolk this weekend, which you really ought to get to if you can). It turns out that they live and breath Drupal, and whats more, had started to get enquiries about OpenAtrium themselves.

Noot

We put our heads together and came up with Noot. Noot is a hosted Open Atrium offering aimed squarely at the public sector here in the UK. The Neontribe gang handle all the technical stuff, while Kind of Digital provides the consultancy and training to make sure customers get the most out of their investment.

Noot provides you with:

  • Groups, allowing people across your organisation or from partner organisations to get together and collaborate.
  • Discussions, so folk can talk to one another.
  • Collaborative authoring, allowing people to jointly create and edit documents.
  • Project and task management, helping to get stuff done
  • File uploading and sharing
  • Yammer or Twitter style status updates

…and a bunch of other cool stuff. What’s more, we’re going to be actively listening to users and developing more features to provide the functionality people really need.

So whether you just want to get people in your organisation talking to each other, want to manage cross departmental projects better, or start doing some serious partnership collaboration, Noot could well be the technology that suits your people and your process.

We’re still tidying things up, getting our marketing messages right and figuring out just how much we are going to charge for this thing. In the meantime, do follow Noot on Twitter, and bookmark the homepage so you know where to go to find out more.

If you’d like a demo or an early chat about Noot, you know where I am.

#Here comes Noot – the public sector social business tool

Wednesday, 4 May, 2011

I like MyFarm!

Now, when I started writing about micro-participation, I never envisaged the possibility of micro-farming, but there we are!

MyFarm is a great initiative from the National Trust, effectively making games like Facebook’s Farmville real.

Participants pay £30 a year to be involved, and get to vote on various decisions affecting the farm. It’s a bit like an agricultural version of MyFootballClub, which saw a bunch of people from the internet buy Ebbsfleet United.

The benefits are increasing knowledge about farming and the countryside – and also to help people understand where food comes from.

It’ a great idea – and a brave one too.

#I like MyFarm!

Tuesday, 3 May, 2011

Thursday, 28 April, 2011

Goodbye Delicious, hello Pinboard

So following the news that Delicious has been bought from Yahoo!, by the guys who did YouTube, I decided it was time to set myself up somewhere else. It might be that Delicious thrives under its new owners – in which case fine, I can always switch back. But I didn’t want to leave myself exposed, and so I’ve switched to Pinboard.

My account is here, in case it’s of interest.

Pinboard seems to be the geek’s choice of bookmarking service and there have been loads of recommendations for it, largely because it is a no-frills version of what Delicious did well – saving, describing and tagging web links.

It seems fine and I’m currently working out how to get the occasional link posts added here. Hopefully it won’t cause too much bother!

Whither WordPress?

I did wonder whether there was a way of doing all my bookmarking within a tool I already use, though, and WordPress seems to potentially fit the bill – not least because I host it myself and so have total control over my data.

After all, I don’t really use the social features of social bookmarking – and tend to rely on it as a publishing tool.

Here’s what I’d like to have: a WordPress plugin that creates a new content type called bookmarks, that has a bookmarklet to make it easy to save them, with a title, description and tags.

It would let me publish them to the blog either as I save them, bundling them into posts of ten links, or maybe a single weekly post. An option to ping them to Twitter would be nice too, and maybe a dedicated feed of just bookmarks. Oh, and I’d want to be able to import my Delicious or Pinboard bookmarks to, so I’ve just got the one database.

Does something like this exist? Or does anyone fancy making it happen? I’d be eternally grateful…

#Goodbye Delicious, hello Pinboard

Wednesday, 27 April, 2011

Bookmarks for April 6th through April 27th

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious. There is also even more stuff on my shared Google Reader page.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.

#Bookmarks for April 6th through April 27th

Tuesday, 26 April, 2011

LocalGovCamp tickets available!

LocalGovCamp is coming back to Birmingham on the 18th June!

200 of the most innovative and creative people in the local government sector will be coming together on a Saturday to talk about making things better – sometimes with technology, sometimes not.

LocalGovCamp is an unconference – basically a conference that’s fun. There’s no agenda until we sort it out on the day – which means no keynoters, no grandstanding and just good conversations.

Grab your ticket on Eventbrite while you can.

We’re also still looking for sponsors, so do get in touch if you’d like to help out.

#LocalGovCamp tickets available!

Saturday, 23 April, 2011

Communities and ‘hyperactivism’

Excellent analysis and writing from Tessy Britton in reaction to the recent disturbances in Bristol:

This is the real landscape into which the Localism Bill will descend. There seems to have been some dramatic shift recently from ‘government knows best’ to ‘community knows best’. With political and media help, a myth that sanctifies community members or groups choices and decisions and demonises everything that local government thinks and does has become widespread. In this paradigm it is very easy to manipulate situations on the grounds of social justice and easy also to make conflict and aggressive strategies look worthy and spirited. In my view this is romantic and wrong and dangerous.

Go read the whole thing.

#Communities and ‘hyperactivism’

Thursday, 21 April, 2011

The wacky world of webinars

I’ve done a few webinars now with the Learning Pool posse and am planning to do a lot more as both a marketing thing for Kind of Digital and as a part of the training work we do.

Webinars are going to be a really important part of the training and communications mix, as they provide a lot of the benefits of face to face learning without the travel expense and time lost of traditional events. The only thing that really sucks about webinars is the name, but I guess we’re stuck with it.

Here’s some lessons I’ve learned from my experiences of running a webinar.

1. Have a wingman

By this I mean someone sat behind the scenes, not talking but just keeping a watching brief over what’s happening. Someone to ping the odd message out to the chatroom, help manage the questions, and to remind you to do and say stuff.

Presenting a webinar can be a bewildering business and having someone to keep you on track is vital.

2. Have a co-presenter

This came as a bit of a surprise to me, but it turns out people don’t want to sit and listen to me talk at them for an hour down the phone. Madness!

Having somebody else involved can make a real difference to the dynamic of the webinar, especially if it brings multiple perspectives to the session. Also, it means that witty banter is on the cards, which improves things for delegates no end.

3. Practice

Always have a run through an hour or so before the actual performance. It improves flow, points out any obvious problems that might happen and gives everyone a chance to rehearse what they will say.

Never skimp on practice!

4. Keep talking

As I found out when doing  webinar this morning, stuff either goes wrong, or at least goes slowly – especially when you are demonstrating a website or online service. If you’re waiting for something to happen, or if you are having to have multiple goes at getting something to work, don’t go quiet!

Keep chuntering on – not just moaning about how the technology never seems to work, but go over some of the stuff you’ve already said, which will probably be a fairly useful refresher to the attendees. Not saying anything can make attendees think that everything has broken, including the sound, so even if you aren’t exactly setting the world alight with your commentary, keep it coming.

5. Interact

Webinars without audience participation can be pretty dull. Set up a couple of polls to run during the event. One great feature of GoToWebinar, the software both Learning Pool and Kind of Digital use, is that it shows you who is paying attention – ie those who have the webinar window in focus on their desktop.

If someone has flicked to check their emails while you are talking, you know about it, and that’s always a good time to launch a poll! You can also get people to type in questions and comments throughout the webinar which keeps participation up and people concentrating.

6. Follow up

When people register for the webinar, they leave their email address – so use it! Send them a link to a recording of the webinar so they can share it with their colleagues and other resources. You can also get attendees to fill in a quick survey at the end which is another great way of grabbing a bit more information from delegates.

Do you have any tips or experiences to share about webinars? Leave them in the comments!

#The wacky world of webinars

Wednesday, 20 April, 2011

Micro-participation at ShropCamp

Continuing my current obsession with micro-participation, I ran a session on the subject at yesterday’s excellent ShropCamp.

Basically I chatted through what micro-participation is and what it tries to achieve, where it came from etc. Then I gave some examples of it in action, and after that asked for some ideas and thoughts from the floor.

Here are the slides:

I’m really taken with this idea, as you can probably tell, and am starting up a project space at microparticipation.com to explore it more fully.

We’re going to be developing the site to be a resource in terms of examples and case studies in micro-participation, discussions about the potential and the issues involved, but also try and get people’s ideas for both online and offline micro-participation.

I’d also really like to find a way of making some of those things happen, by finding organisations to work with.

So if you’re interested in taking this forward, do sign up for updates from the new site!

#Micro-participation at ShropCamp